


Alone For the Holidays

by die-forellex (heatinfreezing)



Series: RivaMika Smutmas 2017 [2]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: And kinda College AU, Bartender AU, F/M, Fun, Injured Levi and Mikasa, Jewish Levi, Modern AU, Oral Sex, Sexy Times, Smutmas Rivamika, Snarky Banter, veteran!Levi, veteran!Mikasa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-14 14:01:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13009365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heatinfreezing/pseuds/die-forellex
Summary: After getting out of the Navy, Mikasa Ackerman is an art student in the city. Alone for Christmas, she walks into a bar with a strangely familiar bartender. Little does she know she has far more in common with him than she ever would have anticipated.





	Alone For the Holidays

Mikasa hasn’t experienced a cold winter in over four years.

She thinks back to Camp Lejeune and the swampy, shitty winters she spent there, then the humid rainy winters she spent in Okinawa and of course the scorching desert sun in Iraq last year.

She wraps her scarf tightly around her neck, the wind whipping against her cheeks as she walks down the street alone.

It’s December 24th and she can’t decide if she would rather be back in the desert with USO sponsored celebrities flying into a warzone to make the battalion feel better about themselves or alone and cold on Christmas Eve in New York City.

Her roommate Sasha had asked her if she wanted to go home for the holidays with her and her family but Mikasa had declined. It would’ve felt awkward to be someone’s good deed for the holidays.

So, she does what anyone alone for the holidays would do. She walks into the bar below her apartment and sits herself down. It’s surprisingly busy, but not so much that she can’t get a seat without someone sitting beside her.

“What’re you drinking tonight?”

The bartender is the same man as always, short, dark hair, grumpy expression with a bit of limp.

She pulls off her coat and scarf, hangs it on the hook beneath the bar and sighs.

“Do you have anything alcoholic and warm?”

“What kind of bougie place do you think this is?”

She frowns, still unable to shake the cold from outside.

The bartender sighs and, with a put-upon expression, mutters “I’ll see what I can throw together,” before he goes back into the small kitchen off of the bar.

Mikasa pulls out her iPad so she can draw.

She’s been coming here for a few months now to work on her graphic novel, but her regular school assignments keep her so busy she feels like she hardly has the time.

Aside from athletics, Mikasa hasn’t excelled at anything besides drawing. She got okay grades in high school and broke state records for track and field, but it was difficult for an orphan on her third high school to really focus on anything that resembled a coherent college application. So, she’d turned to the military.

Her back hurts at the mere thought of the Navy. Her barely healed skin grafts are due for another uncomfortable scar tissue massage that allegedly ‘promotes healing and mobility’’ but really just make her feel miserable for an hour.

It’s been a year since the explosion that had taken her to the edge of life and death, a year since she had saved Eren’s life by pushing him away from the blast of the IED, shielding him with her body in defiance of everything she’d been trained to do. After all, she’d been a Corpsman and if she was out of commission who was going to save the Marines themselves...But she hadn’t thought about that, her body had simply moved, moved to save the boy that she had loved as her family.

Eren’s stationed in Hawaii now, working his way through his second enlistment while she’s a jaded, disabled veteran pushed out of the Navy with a Bronze Star and a GI Bill to burn on an education.

She still talks to Eren but Marine life is busy and it’s not the same as it used to be. He had apologized repeatedly when he couldn’t get leave to come and visit her over the holidays, but she’d insisted that it was okay and that she’d rather come and visit him in Hawaii with his parents in the springtime.

So she ignores her loneliness and the fact that she’s spending Christmas Eve in a random bar as she sketches the beginnings of the next page of her graphic novel based on the military life she’s left behind.

She can’t stop thinking about the military, about how it was her whole life and that everything else feels off. Like no one understands her. Everyone at college is a fresh faced 18 year old whose parents are floating them through expensive art college in the city. She tries to be quiet about her military experience, but it inevitably comes out in her work.

_Do you own a gun?_

_Why are you in art school if you were in the military?_

_Can you fly a plane?_

_Have you ever killed anyone?_

No one asks things like that because they genuinely care, only to feed their sick sense of curiosity.

“Here, try this.”

She looks up from her drawing and sees a hot steaming mug of something.

“Oh, thanks,” she says quietly, sliding a twenty across the bar.

Instead of going off to tend to other patrons he leans against the bar and looks at her expectantly.

“Are you going to try it?”

She glances at him and notes the way his shirt pulls when he crosses his arms in front of him.

_He looks familiar._

She’s frequented this bar for a few months because it’s right below her apartment. She’s seen him fairly often when he comes in, but she can’t help but feel she knows him from somewhere else. 

“What’s your name?”

“It’s Levi,” he says boredly, “now try the drink!”  

_I don’t know any Levis._

“Fine, fine, sheesh,” she says, pretending to be irritated but mostly teasing.

Mikasa sips the drink cautiously and her eyes widen. It’s creamy and warm, sweet but balanced by some bitterness that she’s certain is coffee with a pleasant burn of nice quality alcohol settling into her chest.

“Well?”

She takes another sip in response and he smiles – not a grin but a subtle look of amusement.

“What’s in it?” she asks as she sets down the mug.

“Decaf coffee, irish cream, whiskey and a bit of nutmeg, for holiday cheer.” The way he says holiday cheer sounds so sarcastic that she can’t help but laugh.

“Don’t like Christmas?”

He shrugs and looks around.

“Christmas is fine, better tips and I’m Jewish so it doesn’t really matter that much.”

He makes to give her change for her twenty but she stops him.

“Keep the change, you’re still stuck here after all.”

He pockets the money and meets her gaze before he goes to tend to one of the other few customers at the bar while she sketches her comic and sips her warm drink that somehow makes her feel a little less bitter about being alone on Christmas.

* * *

Mikasa is feeling confident about this page when the clock hits midnight. She looks around and she realizes that she’s the only person left in the bar.

Aside from bartender Levi, that is.

He’s leaning up against the counter, arms crossed and bored.

“Oh God, I’m sorry, how long have you been sitting there just because of me?”

He shrugs.

“I don’t have any plans and I’m closing anyways, do you want another drink?”

She knows she shouldn’t because she doesn’t get paid for another week and her bank account is running a little low.

Without her answer, he still reaches for a new mug and pours from the carafe of coffee from before.

“Here, this one’s on me,” he says as he meticulously pours into the mug, raising an eyebrow as he adds the ‘nutmug for holiday cheer’ and sliding it toward her.

She feels her cheeks warm slightly.

_Handsome._

She blushes even more at the thought.

It’s true, she hasn’t taken much time to notice attractive men lately with school keeping her busy. She’d also downloaded Tinder and deleted it soon after an evening filled with unsolicited dick pics.

_But it’s hard to not notice when a hot guy offers you a drink in an empty bar._

“Well then you should have some on me!” She blurts out awkwardly, fumbling for her wallet.

He pours himself a glass of scotch and takes a sip before he pulls out the cash she’d given him and stick it into the cash register.

“This one is on you,” he says lightly.

“That was your tip!”

He shrugs. “It’s whatever, I’m not too hard up for cash right now anyways.”

That same feeling of familiarity pulls at her again.

_I know I’ve seen him somewhere!_

She scrutinizes his face for a moment longer and it hits her.

“You were just on Jeopardy!!!”

Mikasa loves that show. The Jaegers always watched it together every day without fail. It was one of the only consistent family rituals she’d had since her parents had died. Even though she doesn’t watch every day anymore she catches an episode here and there because it makes her feel a little less lonely.

But she remembers two weeks ago when a snarky bartender from New York City won over half a million dollars on Jeopardy.

He laughs a little.

“Yeah, it was fun.”

“You were really good!” she says excitedly.

“Years of bartending during trivia nights has gifted me an assortment of useless knowledge,” he sips his drink again.

She frowns.

“You don’t need extra tips,” she teases, “you cleared thirty thousand dollars every day you were on!”

“They still haven’t cut me my whole check, and the taxes are murder!” he says, his voice tinged with mock outrage.

“Yeah well,” she reaches across the bar and takes a sip of his scotch, trying to stop herself from pulling a face at how strong it is as she swallows but failing, her face scrunching up as she fights the urge to cough.

“I was going to say something smartass but I haven’t had anything that foul tasting since I drank  _Habushu_  in Okinawa!”

He glares and takes the glass back.

“You got my glass dirty,” he makes a show of wiping off the edge she’d had her mouth on and takes a sip from the opposite end despite this. “and you’re crazy, this is good shit, no way I would ever drink that nasty snake wine.”

This catches her attention, she’s never met an American person who knows what Habushu is unless they were in the military and she says as much.

“Yeah, I was in the Marines a few years back,” he says, his tone both nostalgic and slightly jaded.

“When were you stationed in Okinawa? What year?”

“From oh-nine to twenty-eleven.”

_So a few years before me._

“I was there two years ago, I was a Corpsman in the Navy at Camp Foster.”

“No shit, really?”

“Yeah,” she laughs.

“Blue side or green side?”

In the Navy there are two types of corpsman, blue side and green side. Blue side helps take care of Navy personnel, doing everything from assisting doctors in their daily work to running sick call. Green side corpsman, however, take care of Marines.

“Green. I was in with an infantry battalion.”

“That’s really uncommon for a woman,” he says appraisingly.

She shrugs and finishes the rest of her drink.

“Let’s just say Iraq taught me about tourniquets but Okinawa taught me how to respond to ‘Doc, there’s a weird rash on my dick,” she deadpans.

“No shit, that sounds about right,” he agrees darkly.

She doesn’t know why she brings up the war, even in passing because she doesn’t want to talk about it, but she’s a bit of a lightweight and even a drink and a half reminds her that the Navy is still who she is, that she’d probably still be there if she hadn’t gotten set the fuck on fire a year ago.

Mikasa flinches at her own thought. This is why she tries not to drink too often, she starts to think of things she doesn’t want to think about; bitter, irritated thoughts that buzz around in her head until she can’t hear anything else.

A flash of worry flits across Levi’s face before he masks it and sips his drink.

“You’re always drawing in here, what are you, some kind of artist?”

“I’m trying,” she says, grateful for the change of subject, “burning my GI bill at The New School on a degree in animation and storyboarding, what about you, why are you here?”

He shrugs. “I grew up here, after the Marines it just seemed natural to come back. Don’t have any family or anything but y’know, was born in Brooklyn, will probably die in Brooklyn.” He says it with such an odd combination of cynicism and affection that Mikasa finds it amusing.

They bullshit for the next two hours; everything from the merits of their favorite spot to sit on the subway to his least favorite kinds of customers.

It’s odd for her to feel this way. He’s easy to talk to, easy to rant about her hopes and dreams to. She tells him about her graphic novel, about how it’s based on her experience in Iraq, about the people she’s met and the odd world she’s found herself navigating as a civilian.

“That sounds really good, I’d buy twenty copies.”

There’s something magical about a stranger, something that makes you feel comfortable. Maybe she feels like she can project herself onto him, can see what she wishes to see. Maybe it’s the fact that she’s not invested in his reactions, but she hasn’t been this honest, this open with someone in a long time.

“It’s late,” she says quietly when their conversation hits a comfortable lull.

“Yeah,” he agrees.

But neither of them move.

Mikasa hates to admit it, but she doesn’t feel like being alone. She doesn’t want to go back to her empty apartment that’s too cold because the landlord is too cheap to turn on the heat.

“I live upstairs, do you want to come hang out?”

* * *

The fluorescent bulb in the hallway flickers as Mikasa unlocks her front door and steps inside. She’s thankful that she keeps a relatively clean house, and it’s easier with Sasha out of the city because Sasha can be messy.

She takes off her shoes and she notices that Levi doesn’t. It’s fine, she’s not particularly picky about this kind of thing. Without asking she goes to the sink and gets him a glass of water. He sits on the couch, leaning back into the cushions comfortably.

“Thanks,” he says, taking a sip.

Mikasa sits down beside him on the sofa, not far away but not too close and she feels an awkward tension between them. She hadn’t thought this through, what exactly they would be doing if she invited him up here. At least she hadn’t really thought about it. She just knew that she didn’t feel like being lonely.

_What if he’s a creeper?_

She definitely hadn’t thought this through. She hasn’t met many people that she can’t beat the living shit out of so she typically doesn’t worry about this kind of thing, but she’s still invited a relative stranger into her house.

But he doesn’t feel like a stranger. She feels like she’s known him far longer than just an evening of drinks and conversation.

“Want to watch a movie?” she blurts out awkwardly.

“Sure,” he says mildly.

She scrolls through her Amazon movies and picks the first movie from her recently watched list distractedly.

It happens to be the most recent Star Wars movie.

About twenty minutes in, she doesn’t know exactly how it happens but she has leaned her head on his shoulder, their thighs pressed close together on the couch, her hand in his, tracing light circles on his palm.

Mikasa is glad that she has watched this movie so many times because she can’t pay attention to the plot.

Her stomach is turning with the excitement of something new, her mouth dry when he runs his hand up her thigh, all the while looking blandly at the television.

With a certainty she didn’t realize she possessed she pulls him down to her and kisses him.

She doesn’t know if it’s because it’s been a while or what, but she doesn’t remember kissing ever feeling like this. His teeth, his hands, his hair, she can’t get enough of it. She pins him down onto the couch, straddling his waist and grinds herself against him in a mimicry of what she actually wants.

It comes to a halt when he starts to unbutton her shirt. He notices immediately and pulls away from her, his breathing heavy and eyes dark with want.

“Are you okay?” He asks.

She gets off of him and crosses her arms, embarrassed and ashamed that she even feels this way.

“I just,” she sighs, “my back’s all fucked up.”

She remembers the first time she looked at it. The doctors had told her that it was healing “so nicely” and all she had been able to think about was how ruined it looked, how the texture of her skin was more like an alligator than a woman’s, the unnatural mesh-looking patterns stretched tightly over her back.  

He doesn’t say anything but stands up and takes off his shoes. Then he starts to unbutton his pants and she blushes.

“Wait–”

“We don’t have to screw, just let me show you something.”

He waits for her permission to continue. It’s equal parts the still-there want she feels for him and curiosity that makes her nod.

He pulls down his pants and her eyes widen when she sees that below his right knee is a black prosthetic leg.

_I noticed he had a slight limp._

“Caught the tail end of an explosion. I always say it’s too bad I didn’t lose both legs, then they could’ve made me a bit taller,” he quips and she starts to laugh.

He unbuckles the prosthetic revealing where his leg ends and he sits himself back down on the couch next to her. He stretches his leg out so she can see where it was surgically amputated.

She’s done many tourniquets, marked many a forehead with a T and a time, a time for how long has passed since she tied off blood flow to a limb. Before she can even think about it she touches his thigh and he flinches.

Mikasa looks at him and she can tell he is fighting a bit of discomfort, that being this vulnerable is harder for him than he would like her to believe.

She smooths her hand gently down his knee.

“You’re lucky this is below the knee,” she says lightly.

He chuckles a little. “Yeah, I told myself that a lot when I was strung out on medication for pain in a leg I didn’t have anymore.”

She stands up and sighs, starting to unbutton her shirt. She can’t but feel that she’s thankful that she just recently got the go-ahead to stop wearing compression garments anything but sexy in her mind.

But this thought reminds her again of how long it’s been since she’s been with anyone...well over a year and her hand trembles on the last button of her shirt.

“I have to admit, out of all the things guys have done to get me to take off my clothes this is probably the most memorable,” she jokes nervously.

But his eyes are trained on her hands, his gaze intense the same as before when they’d been kissing.

She swallows and shrugs off her blouse, letting it fall down to the ground unceremoniously. She’s facing him frontwards and her burn only slightly wraps around her hipbone, the worst of it is on her back. She closes her eyes and crosses her arms as if doing this could make her disappear. Even though he showed her his leg, she can’t shake the feeling that he’s going to be repulsed by what she looks like.

She hears him stand up, feels his hand on her hip where her normal skin and the graft meet. He opens his palm and smooths it around her back.

His touch feels different on this skin and she can’t help but flinch.

She feels his breath on her neck and he pulls her close. He presses a kiss where her jaw meets her neck along up to her ear.

“You are fine as you are,” he murmurs quietly to her.

She feels like she could cry, both from relief and his kindness, but to stop herself she leans down and kisses him again with the same intensity as before. If want is what drove her before it is need that pushes her forward now. She pulls his shirt over his head and pushes him back down on the couch, his eyes wide as she sinks to her knees and pulls off his boxershorts.

She smooths hands down his torso, taking her time tracing lazy circles on his hip bones. She can tell he’s trying not to show how worked up he is, how much he wants this too and it gives her a rush of confidence before she takes him in her mouth, smooths her tongue over the head of his cock until he asks her to stop in a strained voice.

She stands up and he’s quick to pull her down into his lap. He undoes her bra and casts it aside, takes her nipple in his mouth, sucking and even grazing his teeth there and it makes her shiver.

God he knows what to do.

“Do you have a condom?” She asks breathily.

He stops.

“Fuck,” he runs a hand over his face, frustrated, “I don’t.”

“What?!”

“I don’t do this often or anything,” he says, clearly flustered.

The information is reassuring, that he doesn’t go home with just any girl from the bar regularly, but she groans all the same.

“Let me check and see if my roommate has anything.”

Sasha’s room is a mess and Mikasa makes it worse as she rifles through all of her roommate’s drawers until she’s ready to lose hope.

Then she catches sight of Sasha’s cookie jar, a smiling care bear, its stomach emblazoned with a rainbow. Without thinking she grabs the top and looks inside and finds not one, not ten, but what has to be something like thirty condoms, many colored or flavored.

_Sasha would have a thing for rainbow condoms._

She manages to find a normal colored one and notes that she owes Sasha.

Mikasa heads back to the living room and quickly pulls off her underwear tossing them aside with any pretense of seduction completely forgotten as she clumsily rips the condom wrapper with her teeth.

She hands the condom to him because it’s been well over a year since she’s messed with one and she’s flustered enough that she knows she’d likely put it on wrong or something equally embarrassing.  

He chuckles at her apparent enthusiasm and she scowls while he rolls the condom down his hard cock.

“What are you laughing at?” she grumbles.

“Nothing,” he says, his tone amused.

She frowns, but instead of saying anything she straddles him and roughly pushes his shoulders into the back of the couch. The amusement on his face already disappearing at the roughness of her touch, his adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows.

Let’s see how much he’s laughing by the time we’re done.

She sinks herself down on him, spurred forward by a confidence that surprises her. He groans and she exhales sharply. It feels good, wonderful even to be filled with something besides her battery operated boyfriend that resides in her nightstand.

She doesn’t want to go slow, she wanted to wipe that smile off his face and make him forget his own name, so she grips his shoulders tightly and rides him and he’s grabbing her hips tightly while he swears and rocks himself into her with her movements.

She can tell when he finishes by the way his body tenses up, the way he looks away from her and bites his lip. She’s close but it’s just not enough. Frustrated, she gets off of him, breathless and flushed.

Wordlessly he takes off the condom and tosses it on the coffee table. Without missing a beat he pulls her to him and kisses along her throat and down to her breast.

“What—“

She moans while he sucks on her nipple. She lets him push her gently down onto the couch so she’s laying down, then he kisses down her stomach to the wet juncture between her legs.

“How many assholes have you screwed that you didn’t think I was going to get you off?”

But before she can answer he licks at her sex and she exhales sharply. He starts out slow and lingering, as if he has all the time in the world. She threads her hand through his hair because she needs something to grab onto. He runs his hand gentle around her thigh and she shivers, can’t help but push up against him as he uses his mouth to pull her apart little by little until she’s as incoherent as he was just minutes earlier.

She looks down at him and swears that he’s somehow smirking, an almost playful look in his eyes when she comes.

She throws an arm over her eyes as she starts to laugh, her whole body so sensitive it’s as if the air itself is tickling her bare skin.

“So bad you’re laughing at me?” He asks. She can tell he’s joking, that he knows it was good so she replies “yes, it was absolutely awful,” and starts to laugh even harder.

After she collects herself, she sits up and looks at him, still naked on her couch, hair messy and mouth slightly swollen.

_God he’s hot._

She’s had quick, one night type thing plenty of times, and one steady hookup, but she’s never felt this way before. She wants to stay, wants to touch him, even hold him and is shocks her.

Considering after the explosion she hasn’t ever let anyone see her like this outside of a medical context it’s even more shocking.

Mikasa looks again at where his leg ends prematurely. He seems confident, like it doesn’t bother him, but she remembers that brief moment of uncertainty before.

She doesn’t need to ask him, doesn’t need any details because she knows somehow that they are the same in this regard.

“Do you want to stay?”

Her voice sounds foreign, low and raspy in a way that is odd to her.

“Sure,” he says quietly. She glances over at his prosthetic leg, laying on its side amongst their discarded clothes.

With a bit of a smirk, she gets up and lifts him over her shoulder and he yelps. He’s far heavier than she would’ve expected, but she is still strong and can lift him with minimal effort.

She carries him into her messy bedroom and sets him down on the bed with a bit of a thump.

“What was that for?” He huffs.

“I didn’t want you to have to put back on your prosthetic just to sleep.”

His expression softens again, a slight upturn in the corner of his mouth instead of a frown that quickly turns to a smirk.

“You probably just want to hide it and watch me hop around,” he quips.

She rolls her eyes and throws him a sand colored t-shirt that she’d worn under her desert uniform.

“Holy shit,” she hears him say as she digs through her closet for a pair of sweatpants.

“What is it?”

She turns around and sees him looking at the inside collar of the shirt, where her last name and the last four of her social security number are written in sharpie for the laundry crew.

“We have the same last name.”

She raises a brow.

“Really?” She’s met a few other Ackermans, it’s not the most uncommon surname after all, but she can’t resist making a jab, “What if we’re long lost cousins or something?” She jokes as she pulls on a T-shirt.

“Well, we already fucked so that’s that,” he says dryly, “is your old man a New York Jew?”

She pulls on her pajama pants and sits next to him on the bed.

“No, he was just a farm boy from Kansas,” she says a little stiffly.

He notes her use of the past tense, she can tell by the brief flash of discomfort on his face but thankfully he doesn’t ask her about it.

They lay down together and she turns off the light. He’s quick to wrap an arm around her waist and pull her close. He opens his hand and gently runs it on her hip and to her back, smoothing it over her healed skin in a way that makes her still feel a bit nervous, but she lets him all the same.

“I meant it earlier,” he says quietly, clearly on the verge of falling asleep, “you’re fine as you are.”

Mikasa closes her eyes and lets herself fully relax in his arms to drift off to sleep, but not before she thinks to herself that she’s glad that she didn’t spend Christmas alone.


End file.
